Caveman with a computer

[Sleepwalk]

I am not a tech savy person. But this is what i do know.

I am running windows 8 on a pavilion 23. Its not a top of the line machine but it should run this game fine.

System stats
AMD A6-5200 APU with Radeon (Tm) HD Graphics) 2.00ghz
8.00 GB (7.44 GB usable)
64-bit operating system

internet speed test
47 ping , download speed 4.37mbps, upload speed .75mbps

Now here are my issues. I have somewhere around 5-10 min zones (if i don't crash). Randomly the game shuts off. And if I go LD while playing, all the monsters and players disappear but i can run around indefinitely until I try and zone which will finally crash the game client. (which first happened to me in OT while pulling. I thought a bard had just pulled everything.)

Now I can say that this is getting frustrating. I can't figure it out and really I don't have the know how technically to really have any ammunition to try anything but this is what I have done. I have redone all of my drivers. I have reinstalled the game and gone through the getting started portion enough times that I know its instructions by memory and have retraced my steps enough time to know that I am doing it the exact way the instructions specify.

I have uninstalled all third party virus software and I put everquest on an exclusion list on windows firewall.

From a user point of view it really feels like I am constantly dealing with an abnormal amount of lag. I turned off all of the particle density crap and i am running the game on the lowest settings possible. However I feel that I shouldn't have to considering i use to play this game on a single core machine back in the day with higher settings.

I have wondered if maybe there is something wrong with my machine so I took it into bestbuy and had the geek squad look at it but they said it was fine.

Anywho thats my rant. If you have any step by step instructions I can follow them. If you made it this far thanks for reading!

[BulletCatcher]

any over clocking? Any overclocking tools that you may have used? Does this occur with other online games or services like youtube/netflix?

How much free hard disk space do you have?

Have you tried reinstalling P99?

I wouldn't disable your anti virus either. (you said all, you had multiple AV software running? They could have removed certain files in an attempt to be helpful.)

[Thulack]

Well honestly it sounds like you arent getting a good connection to the server. 5mbps is pretty low but i guess that is the cheapest plan comcast has. Not being computer literate its hard to tell you to check what ports you have blocked and such and i doubt geek squad could even fix that. God i dont even want to ask how much you paid geek squad to "look over" your computer which is exactly what they probably did lol.

[BulletCatcher]

Well honestly it sounds like you arent getting a good connection to the server. 5mbps is pretty low but i guess that is the cheapest plan comcast has.

This can be confirmed by determining if other online services act in this same degraded way. Bad network card? bad home modem? can the ISP reset your connection on their end? These would only be helpful if all your internet experiences were choppy and/or unreliable.

[Sleepwalk]

Free disk space is 859 of 914gb if your referring to hard drive?
Yeah my internet seems choppy all the time.

As far as checking what ports are blocked yeah that is all greek to me.

[Sleepwalk]

as far as internet speed goes. I don't know what is good connection even is.

For example where would dial up be compared to my current internet situation? What would someone expect out of a cable modem connection in 2004ish?

As far as Comcast is concerned I can't even get a higher connection from them based on where i am currently. Which brings up the nightmare of them installing fiber optics cables on my street then having their truck break and spew hydrolic fluid all over my yard.

[BulletCatcher]

don't worry about ports yet. Go with the simple fix attempts first.

unplug your modem, wait 30 seconds plug it back in.
Is the internet choppy still? is your modem near any other electronics like a microwave or something that gets hot?

Check your cables. Are they clean and in good condition? replace if they are warped, cut open, or if you can see exposed wires. Also what kind of cabling is it? CAT5? CAT5e? CAT6? It will be labeld on the cable itself. You will at least want 5e. with is 100Mbps. How many other people are using the same internet connection? Wireless and/or wired?

you can always contact your ISP and tell them you experiencing trouble all around and you would like them to reset the connection on their end. If it is Time Warner Cable, you can reset your connection from their end using a smart phone app. (maybe the website too, not sure)

Does your computer have enough space around it to breathe with good airflow? Is your PC hot to the touch?

Can you open the task manager and look at the performance tab? Any of those graphs maxed out?

[Sleepwalk]

I do the unplug the modem trick every half hour it seems. There are alot of devices that use the internet in the house but the main thing is that no one is ever really using them. for example i have a watch that uses the internet lol. Alot of wireless devices though.

4 phones 4 computers 2 tablets 1 watch sometimes a playstation 4. And I would kinda expect it to be slower when everyone is doing things. However I go around and turn everything off and still have the same performance.


My computer has alot of area to breath and is never hot to the touch. Performance wise even when the game is playing it doesn't go over 10%

I am going to check out the cables.

[Champion_Standing]

Wifi?

[Thulack]

Guessing phone are iphones? Ive seen posts with people complaining about other games lagging while their iphones were connected to their wifi. Disable them from the wifi and try it out. I know you said you turn everything off but i doubt you turn your phones off. Also dont have them plugged into your PC. But yeah 10 things connected to your low quality internet i would suspect that is the issue.

[Madbad]

Try WinEQ if its not already installed. You have a multi-core system, and EQ is know to have a host of problems with that.

EQ should run well on a toaster with a 56k connection, I'm willing to bet its an issue with modern hardware incompatibility (which WinEQ should solve) or an issue with your router.

[Frudrura]

It might be a bit of stretch, something you could consider doing is change the channel that you Wifi is broadcasting at. If you live in an area where there are a lot of wireless networks, the channel that your router is broadcasting at could be congested. The program is easy to use, the difficult part if any, would be changing the channel in your wireless network settings. If you feel adventurous, this could be doable.

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5936-inssider.html

The above link is to download the software if you are interested. This may or may not help.

[Nuggie]

I had a serious problem with my labtop that had symptoms that were like this. I first diagnosed the internet connection as the problem(easy fix). I watched the performance on the CPU for about two weeks. Turned out it was in a power saver mode. When the screen saver tried to kick on it would power down most of the processor which SERIOUSLY made things slow as a turtle. Look at your operating system settings for any power saver crap and put it back into power mode.